Wedding Website & Wedding Planning System

The problem

A wedding is run out of a dozen places at once. Replies arrive on WhatsApp, in person, through an aunt, or not at all, and the couple keep a spreadsheet that is out of date the moment it is saved. The budget is in a different spreadsheet, the supplier quotes are in an inbox, the running order is in somebody's notes, and the seating plan is on paper and redrawn every time one person changes their mind. Sending a hundred and forty personal invitations means typing a hundred and forty messages by hand. At the door there is no way to tell an invited guest from a friend of a friend, so everyone is waved through and the numbers the caterer was given stop meaning anything. Afterwards, the photographs everybody took are scattered across a hundred and forty phones, and the couple never see most of them.

What we did

We built the invitation and the system that runs behind it as one thing, and then kept building until the whole wedding lived in it. Guests reply with the four digit code on their card or the phone number the couple already have, and each of them also has a personal link that greets them by name; one person can answer for a whole household while everybody still gets their own ticket. The answer lands in the admin immediately with the meal, the allergy, the transport request, the emergency contact and the songs they want attached. Invitations and reminders go out from the site itself through Meta's WhatsApp Cloud API, paced, opted out of properly and marked delivered and read as they land, or through a free one-tap route that writes each message and hands it to WhatsApp for the couple to send. Behind the guest list sits a full planning suite: the budget with quotes, contracts, deposits and instalments; the suppliers from enquiry to settled with their contracts and arrival times; shared tasks with owners and due dates; and a running order for the day. Guests arrive to a sealed envelope: tapping the wax seal opens it and draws the invitation card out, and the card becomes the home page. The website itself has three faces and changes between them by the clock: the invitation until the morning of the wedding, a wedding day page with tickets, notices and times, and afterwards a memories page where guests upload their photographs straight from their phones to the couple's own Google Drive. The couple and their planners see the same pages; the people on the door get a sign-in that opens the check-in scanner and nothing else, and the gift table gets a link that works on one phone and records the money and the presents as they arrive. The whole thing is PHP and SQLite on ordinary shared hosting, with no framework, no build step, no monthly subscription and one config file to change for the next couple.